Drug WarRant

Apparently nobody considered that drug smugglers might have access to a jack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGfWgiOSMZQ&feature=player_embedded#!

Via Transform

Guatemala prez to propose legalizing drugs

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said Saturday he will propose legalizing drugs in Central America in an upcoming meeting with the region’s leaders.

Perez Molina said in a radio interview that his proposal would include decriminalizing the transportation of drugs through the area.

“I want to bring this discussion to the table,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a crime to transport, to move drugs. It would all have to be regulated.”

Central America is waking up very forcefully to the fact that they are the unwilling battleground for the war that the U.S. is fighting, and there isn’t enough money coming from the U.S. (or likely to) to make that worthwhile.

It’s like the U.S. went to the rest of America and said “Hey, we’d like to fight a war, but we don’t want to do it at our place. We just vacuumed. OK if we use your living room? We’ll give you a few bucks for the inconvenience.” And it sounded like a good deal at first until their children started dying.

Now, the countries to the south are all starting to get sick and tired of it. Ready to put up lawn signs saying “No drug war here. Try further north.”

Cowboy Cop Makes the Conservative Case for Marijuana Legalization at CPAC

“The reactions have been almost 100 pecent in favor of what I’m doing,” Wooldridge, who claims he hasn’t smoked marijuana in thirty years, tells me. “I’ve had about three people in the last two days out of about 200 who do not like it.” Particularly with this conservative crowd, Wooldridge debates his naysayers in terms of conservative principles. “Personal freedom, personal responsibility, and limited government are what conservatives believe in,” he says. “And that’s what I believe in. And thats what we should do with marijuana policy. I say, ‘Give me a conservative reason to keep it going,’ and they dont have any.”

Howard is a powerful force. His ubiquitous cowboy hat and “Cops say legalize” shirt make a statement everywhere he goes, but he also knows how to make a statement himself that resonates with the listener.

This is something that I have taught in my elevator argument workshops. I was thrilled to have Howard attend one of them, but, of course, he’s been doing this kind of thing for much longer.

It’s about making a quick argument that cuts right to the interests of the person listening and not getting bogged down with arguments that are irrelevant to, or distract from, that single purpose.

We all can take a little bit of Howard and apply it to our activism.

With traffickers having the resources to create tunnels this sophisticated, the government can only hope, at best, to stop a tiny portion of what comes through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G9uBskG574&feature=player_embedded

Of course, there’s always the chance that the authorities will stumble on one of the tunnels.

No investigation when suspected drugs found at home of official

I agree with Radley Balko on this one…

On the one hand, my default position would be that no one should lose her job, her reputation, or her freedom over marijuana. I’d also imagine most people would be sympathetic to someone who recently lost a spouse in a car accident. It would also appear that in this case, the police found the pot after entering this particular woman’s home illegally.

On the other hand . . . according to the source in the story, if this had happened to your average resident of Tennessee, they at the very least would be subject to a criminal investigation.

But there was no investigation. Which is likely because this woman was—and still is—the director of the Tennessee state agency “whose mission is to eradicate marijuana.”

Speaking of Balko, his latest piece is out at Huffington Post: The New Panic Over Prescription Painkillers

War against drugs has failed on many fronts, Chicago police chief and Cook County executive agree

Drug enforcement measures in place for decades have filled jails with poor and minority offenders, marred police officers’ credibility in the neighborhoods they patrol and fractured communities, Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle agreed at a forum Wednesday night.

Chipping away…

Tea Party Warrior: Report Medical Marijuana Clubs to the IRS and Get Rich

The “Tea Party” aspect seems a bit irrelevant to this story, but the key thing is that drug warrior Paul Chabot seems willing to do just about anything to sink further into the slime of the drug war. Fortunately, his treachery is blunted by his idiocy.

Fun with headlines:

Headline: Fire at Santa Rosa marijuana grow operation kills six pets

Implication: Grow op causes fire that kills pets

Truth:

“The fire literally destroyed every room in the living area,” Basque said. “The living room, kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms — it was all destroyed.”

Firefighters found 75 to 100 marijuana plants growing in an attached garage. The residents had a license to grow the plants, Basque said.

Though the cause of the fire is still under investigation, Basque said it did not start in the garage.

I guess “Fire in house kills six pets” wasn’t interesting enough.

Breaking News: Medicinal Cannabis Laws Have No Discernable Adverse Impact On Adolescents’ Pot Use

Again, no surprise here.

Getting gramdma to try pot (fun video)

I’ve got a friend who had to get some stats with Google Analytics as part of his web assignment, so he asked some friends to visit his page just so he would get a few readings of visitors. I’m hoping that if a lot of you visit, it will throw his numbers off from his wildest estimations.

It’s a silly little practice page: The Basement is Weird You can just click on it and leave if you want (no ads or anything). The video is cute, though.

This is an open thread.

The ONDCP’s Above the Influence ad campaign seems to be getting almost desperate to find “coolness” — at least that’s the impression I got from the “Rise Above” ad below, which appears to be trying to tap into the Parkour fad.

Here we have a youth avoiding the dangers of alcohol and other drugs by jumping off rooftops onto neighboring buildings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF1nzKXfgAA&feature=player_embedded#!

I think it’s a pretty cool thing as well and wish I had the guts and skill, but is that really what the ONDCP, as a government agency, wants to promote to youth?

When I started this blog back in 2003, I would have been shocked to see an article titled Legal Recreational Marijuana: Not So Far Out in Time Magazine.

I also would not have expected to see regular, smart columns about drugs and drug policy by someone like Maia Szalavitz in Time.

But time moves on and so does our discourse. My mom loves to clip positive articles about drug policy reform that she finds in her local paper and save them for me. Even she gets excited about the increased awareness.

Speaking of Time…

I was reminded today of this powerful and outstanding OpEd by the creators of The Wire which ran in Time Magazine in 2008: The Wire’s War on the Drug War

Worth a re-read.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

We all like a good fisking here, and I enjoy doing it immensely, but today will be satisfied with some wonderful jobs done by others.

Scot Morgan has done a hilariously accurate job with What if Day Care Workers Get Stoned on Marijuana and Kill Children?, which is based on a letter someone wrote to their newspaper opposing marijuana legalization:

What about the children’s day care workers? If they smoke it and their senses are dulled by its use and they drop little Johnny on his head, whose fault is it now? If it’s legalized, there is no crime and no recourse for problems it causes.

Scott rips it apart and I particularly loved this moment of snark:

Fortunately, things aren’t actually that bad in real life, especially if you’re not a paranoid idiot. For example, our foremost concerns about bad things happening at day care centers can be resolved satisfactorily in almost every case simply by choosing a facility with a good reputation for not killing the children.

…

Over at the International Harm Reduction Assocation blog, they’ve got Child rights debates in drug policy deserve better than this. IHRA takes on a paper written by Drug Free Australia’ Josephine Baxter, vice president of the World Federation Against Drugs. The paper is The rights of the child: Ensuring a ‘child-centred’ drug policy is a vital human rights issue for those who influence drug policy

The weakness of the paper, especially given its international law focus, is evident from the first sentence:

“Global drug issues (including manufacture and trafficking of illicit substances) have been controlled through cooperative efforts of many countries, within the framework of the United Nations Drug Control Conventions for 100 years’

See the problem? The United Nations was founded in 1945, for starters. It will be 100 years old in thirty three years. What’s more, the current model came into being in 1961. Earlier conventions were far less restrictive including legally regulated models for opium. Many substances weren’t included until the 1960s, others in the 1970s and others still in the 1980s and 1990s.

The paper goes on to list these 100 year old conventions, starting at 1961.

Baxter throws around non-existent words like unlaterally and unequivably in contexts that don’t even connect to what correct versions of those words would mean.

The problems go on and on… As IHRA notes:

This is lazy, clumsy stuff. Child rights debates in drug policy deserve better.

Interesting article by Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation in the Guardian: Magic mushrooms, international law and the failed ‘war on drugs’.

It’s actually two OpEds in one — the first being about the failed war on drugs and efforts within the world community to push back against the drug conventions, either through finding the “wiggle room” or through amending them.

The other is about the fascinating research into the effects of psilocybin on the brain.

Many users of psychedelics report the experience as a consciousness-expanding one, and conventional wisdom suggests that such drugs should increase brain activity and blood flow to the brain.

Instead, the research in PNAS showed that psilocybin decreased blood flow to specific regions of the brain that act as “connector hubs”, where information converges and from where it is disseminated. In the paper, we suggest that these hubs normally facilitate efficient communication between brain regions by filtering out the majority of input in order to avoid over-stimulation and confusion. But the hubs also constrain brain activity by forcing traffic to use a limited number of well-worn routes. Psilocybin appears to lift some of these constraints, allowing a freer and more fluid state of consciousness.

In the second study, subjects were given cues to recall positive events in their lives. With psilocybin, their memories were extremely vivid, almost as if they were reliving the events rather than just imagining them.

The findings suggest potential uses for psilocybin in the treatment of depression

We haven’t talked much about magic mushrooms here, but certainly psilocybin is an unfortunate victim of the war on drugs. It’s one of the most harmless of the illicit drugs (and less harmful than most licit drugs) and one that has some of the highest potential for beneficial use.

Certainly, at the very least, restrictions should be eased to make it easier to do research on psilocybin.

I got a kick out of Professor David Nutt’s comment (Nutt has called for legalizing psilocybin and has often been criticized as being “pro-drug” in his call for a rational harm scale on drugs):

“I’m not recommending anyone taking any drugs. I’m just suggesting we need to have a more scientific rational approach to drugs and vilifying drugs like psilocybin whilst at the same time actively promoting much more dangerous drugs like alcohol is totally stupid scientifically.”